Interest in deep seabed mining is growing due to the increasing in global demand for metals and recent technological progress. Critical metals are used in low carbon energy technologies, as well as in the mobility, electronics and the defense industries. Metals become strategic when they are essential to the economy of a state, its defense and energy sector and when their supply presents high risks. Uneven distribution of resources and differences in cost of production have led to a market characterized by oligopolies (China for rare earth elements, or the Democratic Republic of Congo for cobalt). As the remaining onshore resources of critical metals appear complex and costly to exploit, attention has been shifting to deep sea resources. 

Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus have long been a blind-spot for Chinese diplomacy and economic policy. For over a decade, however, China has been laying the foundations of a long-term presence in the area, a process which has accelerated since the end of 2013 with the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Strategic competition between India and China in the Indian Ocean is growing and has the potential to profoundly impact the stability and security of the region. The Indian Ocean is becoming the scene of a sustained contest that in some ways resembles strategic competition during the Cold War.

In September 2010, China stopped all exports of rare earths and associated products to Japan, depriving Japan’s industry of essential raw materials. This decision highlighted the tensions around the trade of critical materials and China’s monopoly on a group of particular metals. Western countries had already taken some initiatives so as to reduce, or at least to analyse their vulnerabilities in the segment of critical materials. 

The issue of the digital transformation of the industry provoked in France as in Germany the return of the state and the introduction of a subsidiary industrial policy. Feeling threatened in its industrial leadership, Germany mobilized its resources through industry 4.0 by building a vision around the concept of “cyber-physical system” before developing in each Land an accompanying offer. France has forged the concept of the industry of the future by following a logic of modernization of the production tool, reinforcing particularly the automation and building on the integration of new technological bricks.

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